By some strange, verboten miracle, the body breathes: the heart throbs: the blood blooms, and blackens, and bubbles shut—crusted seams a grotesque crystallization down the skin of a specimen barely beating, pale as one kissed by death, but the consummation denied.
Still living, and demanding of it.
His notes slide, gradually, from recordation to eulogy. Moulded beneath his hands: a gnashing beauty. In the binds of his own creation: a monstrous hell, unleashed.
Beyond it, the subject finds ways to surprise him.
First, by its spiteful survival. Generations of filth devoured and reclaimed; poison peeled to sustenance.
Second, by its spiteful tongue.
"Your notes would suggest you have a creature in your midst, Doctor."
Corin hums. "Otherness requires a degree of neutrality."
A scoff through chipped teeth; dead eye a flame-spark in the dim. "Is that what you call it? Otherness."
And what else could he say, to describe a Kindred reborn? An old god entombed, vengeful in a lilac-veined host?
"Topsiders hadn't much care for you, had they?" says Silco, hunched by a microcosm of tubes and vials. He speaks with the chilled arrogance of one who only seeks confirmation for an answer already known.
They are both often cruel in their motives, and not often kind.
The commonality is a welcome one.
"They hadn't for your father, either," Corin rasps, squinting at a serum oil-slicked and effervescent. He ticks the bubbles free. "And they won't, for you."
Silco's scarred mouth cuts sharply at one side. "Presumptuous."
An answer he, himself, already knows.
Their retribution was always due to come—and, with it, their plague.
This man is as much his own creation as that of the gluttoned city above.
The smirk falls; eyes seafoam and molten narrowing, hazed with a violet glow. Slowly, Silco straightens. "Don't get smart."
Corin offers a dry smile. One day, the lips will be gone, the teeth exposed, only a mottling of singed flesh. It will become his namesake, as this man's rotted eye will become his own.
"A new strain," he mutters then, ambitions shelved, and clicks the vial into an injector. The subject is well-trained, knows the times they are due, has become expectant of them. He is keen to think he has control of the strings, these days. Still, he waits at Corin's heels.
His chair squeaks. "Mild hyperesthesia. Increased sensitivity to light is also likely. But the regenerative properties are more stabilized."
Corin eyes him. "Long enough." He waits, turns the glass between his fingers, flicks its needlepoint at the stool beside him. "Sit."
Always obedient, no matter his spittling mouth. A spindly hand dragged through dark hair: feigned vanity in the face of nervousness. More anxious than his knife-edged stare suggests.
Greenish and gold, blue-fire and ember, framed by lashes that flicker. Corin drags a coarse thumb beneath one eyelid. A hush of tobacco-stained breath fans over his jaw. "Hold still."
The needle pierces smooth as silk. Violet blooms: dragon's blood and black spice. Veins lurch beneath his fingertips: the lungs contract: the body contorts into a shiver, a husken wheeze, a ragged gruff, ecstatic and tortured in turns.
Corin smooths the stream of violet from the subject's chin, ungentle and unfeeling. Captivated.
The destruction, beautiful. The remelding, enrapturing.
Silco's temple slumps into his palm, clammy and weakened, but the weakness misleads—in the simple coffin of the flesh lies a thrashing thing; a century of starved retribution, unearthed. A hunger that will stand on the bones of the living and dead—on the shell of this city, in full—before it could dream of being sated.
The thought earns a shiver of its own, deep in the recesses of Corin's blood.
In the face of a dream long-buried, a shred of pride is unavoidable: awed at the horror, the holiness, of realization.
To some, perhaps, it could be called love.
His thumb disobeys him, skirts against the fish-cool neck. "Well done, boy," he hushes.
The body tenses. The hairs rise. Beneath his touch, a pebbling of skin.
And only with a clinical intrigue does he permit himself to admire it.
singed and silco / the created
